But the Indian city (whichever one it is) has melted walls! And huddled skeletons! And ash everywhere! And levels of radioactivity anywhere between 100 and 5,000 times those found in nature! (depending on just how batshit the author of the book you're reading is ;)

@256 - However, it would make for a great plot point for a game of some sort. Like I said, an interesting read, but in no way did I present it as anything more or less than that. Mind you, just looking at the articles linked off of that page, it's pretty easy to deduce that the site leans heavily toward conspiracy theory and other amusement. ;)

The entire history of the observable universe, all 13.7 billion years of it, has been for the first time successfully modeled by six scientists using a French supercomputer.

Called the Dark Energy Universe Simulation (DEUS): full universe run, the historic supercomputer simulation created and tracked 550 billion particles, each the mass of our own Milky Way galaxy or greater, that were thought to be created in the Big Bang — the seminal expansive event that scientists believe birthed all matter into existence — to the present day.

The simulation was run over a two-week period in mid-March on the CURIE supercomputer housed at the Très Grand Centre de Calcul (Very Large Computing Center) in Bruyères-le-Châtel, a commune in Northern France.

When I broke the neck of my sick cat and then made a handbag of her skin, I honestly had no idea of what I had got myself into.

The project was an artwork entitled My dearest cat Pinkeltje, with which I wanted to launch a discussion about hypocrisy. We simultaneously keep animals both as part of our families and as a commodity to be consumed. We live in a culture where the origin of our food or clothing is seldom seen, and we hand our sick pets over to an expert to be given a lethal injection to end their suffering. Did you know that there is still disagreement about the so-called "painless" euthanasia performed by professional vets? People in rural areas – where they take such matters into their own hands – laugh at these tales from the city.

I decided those threats had to be turned into a book. For almost a year, the editor Coralie Vogelaar studied the contents of my mailbox and researched the writers' identities online. The hate mails were categorised, and in total we defined 12 variations of content and format, which became the book's chapters. We published not only the hate mails, but also all the information we found on the Facebook profiles, Amazon wish lists, and YouTube accounts that were linked to the email addresses. The combination of the data often gave a very comprehensive picture of the "private" lives of these people. In some instances, we even found pictures of their houses on Google maps. Most of those menacing emails were sent by people who appeared quite normal: sweet-looking teenage girls, policemen, housewives, office workers. With only a few exceptions, these were not people you would expect to brawl, let alone issue a death threat.

Oh hey, I remember when that site about how to make a purse out of your cat was up. I remember being really disgusted cos I couldn't find any information about "oh, this cat was sick and needed to be put down" or anything similar. At the time I really thought she had just found some cat and killed it to make a purse for fun. I did not email her any death threats.

"One woman told how she had believed the two Roma women were genuine mystics, and had been persuaded to take tens of thousands of pounds and go to a nearby lake for a midnight ritual. She had been told that she had to release herself from the burden of her money and throw it all in the lake – but when she hesitated a demon like figure had emerged from the water and in a panic – she had thrown the money into the water and run away. But police discovered that the water devil was in fact a pal of the pair who had put on diving gear and a mask to terrify the unsuspecting victim."

The original uploader, “CHImushroom”, is a senior student at a high school in Xiaogan, central China’s Hubei province. In the photo, the classroom is brightly lit up late in the evening. On each desk, piles of books take up much space. Wires are installed above desks for hanging IV-drip dispensing bottles. Another animated gif picture offers a panoramic view of the classroom with a teacher standing in the front giving a lecture. “CHImushroom” joked in her microblogging post on Weibo, “This teacher, faced with such an intimidating scene, how did you manage to stand firm and hold it?”